USGIF GotGeoint BlogUSGIF promotes geospatial intelligence tradecraft and a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives.

November 19, 2018

We are not on track to constrain global temperature rise to 2°C let alone 1.5°C. Therefore we need some innovative technologies to get us back on track. At the Geography2050: Powering our Future Planet conference at Columbia University in New York, several presentations described innovative, potentially disruptive technologies that could dramatically change how electric power is generated and transmitted.

Wireless power transmission

General Rick Deveraux of Viziv Technologies described a way of transmitting electric power wirelessly using a technology called a Zenneck surface wave that orovides a direct wireless connection from a generator to a load. It supports much higher field strengths than conventional Hertzian waves and follows the Earth's curvature. Viziv is currently working in a global demonstration project that involves building a fiberglass transmission tower and field intensity monitoring stations around the globe. An advantage of this technology is that it could deliver power to people who are currently off grid. Testing of this configuration starts within 30 days and actual power delivery next year.

On demand emissionless power generation

Christofer Mowry of General Fusion, described how nuclear fusion can provide energy dense, low environmental impact, manufacturable, and dispatchable power generation. In other words a fusion installation requires very little land and can be placed near the sources of load avoiding long haul transmission lines. There are no emissions and very little waste. It does not require fuels that are constrained by supply like fission does. It can supply large volumes of power on demand. The amount of investment in fusion has increased dramatically since about 2007.

Cell phones not requiring recharging

Frank Prautzsch of Velocity Technology Partners described what is potentially a disruptive technology that could affect everyone carrying a cell phone. Thermionic energy conversion (TEC) provides a way of generating power from ambient thermal energy using nano technology. Developed by Birmingham Technologies the Nano-Boxx consists of two metal plates composed of different metals that are placed less than 10 nanometers apart with a nanofluid in between. An electric current is generated when electrons from one plate vaporize and collect on the other plate. The device that was shown was the size of a postage stamp. By stacking them the device can scale from milliwatts to megawatts. 8 to 9 of these will power a cell phone, 800-900 a satellite. It can produce power for about eleven years without charging. To date it has been tested by using it to power an LG Nexus cell phone for the past few years. It is cheaper to produce than a lithium ion battery, has 40% more energy density, and has no emissions.

Powering the world for a million years

Kevan Weaver of the Idaho National Laboratory outlined the results of their calculations that advanced reactors would enable depleted uranium stockpiles and known reserves of uranium to supply 80% of the world's electric power demand for about 2000 years with no carbon emissions. If you add the uranium in the oceans there is enough to provide a source of power for a million years. China and India are investing heavily in fission power generation. Micro-reactors and small modular reactors can provide safe power to data centers, remote locations that are off-grid, and locations where fossil and other fuels are expensive. The latest reactors (generation III and III+) are much safer than the first and second generation reactors like those at Fukushima, primarily because they do not require an external source of power to cool them in the case of an emergency shutdown.

November 19, 2017

In a new report from the Brookings Institution Digitalization and the American workforce the changing requirements for digital skills for job types covering 90% of the U.S. workforce has found dramatic changes in the last 15 years. As recently as 2002 under half of U.S. jobs required digital skills. By 2016 70% of jobs required digital skills. Almost a quarter of U.S. jobs now require high digital skills.

Virtually all industry groups saw increased digital skill requirements increase from 2002 to 2016. The industries leading the digital charge were professional, scientific and technical services; media; and finance and insurance. Trailing the pack are education, transportation and warehousing, basic goods manufacturing, and construction. Looking at construction the report notes that in the period 2010-2016 construction output out rose by 2.7%, wages rose by 1.4%, and productivity decreased by -0.6%, highlighting the continuing challenge of productivity stagnation in the construction industry. Among occupations construction labourers have the lowest digital skills, perhaps one of the reasons paper drawings still typify construction sites.

During this period the digital skill level of even the least digitalized occupations have risen. Welders and heavy truck drivers saw their digtial skillls scores triple or more. By 2016 48 percent of low digital skills occupations employing 33 million workers had become medium-digital or even high-digital occupations. Among the occupations transitioning from low digital scores to medium or high include tool and die makers and bus and truck mechanics. Even at the very bottom end, the digital skills of construction laborers increased through not by enough to move them out of the low digital skills category.

May 06, 2016

A Falcon 9 rocket delivered a Japanese satellite into Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) and successfully returned its first stage to SpaceX's "Of Course I Still Love You" drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. JCSAT-14 is a communications satellite owned by SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation.

Screen shot of the Falcon 9 first stage landing on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

This is the third successful return of a Falcon 9 first stage. One was returned to hard ground, and two have returned successfully to an ocean barge. This launch inserted its payload into a geosynchronous orbit which requires higher velocities than lower Earth orbits.

Falcon 9 is a two-stage rocket designed and manufactured by SpaceX for the transport of satellites and the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. Falcon 9’s first stage has nine Merlin (named after the Rolls Royce engines used most famously in Spitfires ?) engines and can sustain the shutdown of up to two of these engines and still complete its mission. The Falcon 9 first stage generates more than 7.6 million N (1.7 million pounds) of thrust at sea level. It can deliver a payload of 22.8 tonnes to low Earth orbit (LEO), 8.3 tonnes to GTO, and an estimated 4 tonnes to Mars. A key feature of the first stage is that it is designed to be able to fly itself back to Earth to a safe landing, so it is reusable.

Another distinguishing feature of the Falcon 9 is that it uses a pneumatic stage separation system unlike the pyrotechnic systems used on most launch vehicles. A major advantage of pneumatics is that it can be tested non-destructively.

April 18, 2016

I am back from two remarkable days at the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in Houston. One thing that has stuck in my mind, because it is likely going to impact all of us, is augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality. AR has been around for a very long time, but has been used for very specific and narrow purposes such as training for space missions, has required a heavy iron computing platform, a heavy head harness and heavy lenses, and has been very expensive. Paul Davies of Boeing traced the history of AR including its progress on and off the Gartner hype cycle;

Innovation trigger 2004-2006, 2008-2009 (dropped altogether in 2007)

Peak of inflated expectations 2010-2012,

Trough of disillusionment 2013-2015.

According to the hype cycle, AR is positioned for the slope of enlightenment leading to the plateau of productivity where it starts contributing to solving some of the world's challenges.

David Smith, CTO, Wearality gave a very informed presentation on augmented reality that identified the critical issues that have held up the technology. He made a convincing case for why AR is poised to take off - not on PCs, but on smartphones.

Platform

According to Gartner, PC shipments declined by 8.3 % in 4Q2015. Smartphone shipments continue to rise, almost exponentially. Current and future investment in platforms is going into smartphones, not PCs. While AR for PCs will continue to ship, mobile AR will quickly outstrip AR for PCs. With one exception all the technologies that AR requires are available on smartphones. The implication is that the future of mass AR is mobile AR.

3D

You can make the case that there is so much 3D technology and data out there that we have reached the critical mass where we need an inherently 3D platform to take advantage of it. Games led the way, but now construction (BIM), mechanical design, GIS, and other important sectors have moved into 3D in a major way.

Last year the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has approved the Augmented Reality Markup Language 2.0 Interface Standard (ARML 2.0). ARML 2.0 provides a free and open, non-proprietary encoding that content providers can use to specify the location and visual appearance of real world objects and virtual objects in an augmented reality scene. Additionally, ARML 2.0 defines a Javascript interface for communicating how user input selects, queries and dynamically changes the properties of these virtual objects.

Paul Davies of Boeing gave a specific example of an experiment conducted at Boeing where using AR to instruct a worker in the complex process of a wing assembly was found to be much more effective than providing a PDF manual with detailed instructions. The AR process combined real images of the components and the work space with virtual demonstrations in 3D showing the worker which components went where and exactly how to put them in place. The results of the experiment showed that the quality of the worker's first attempt to assemble the wing was much better with the AR instruction and the time she required to assemble the wing was 1/3 faster.

Optics

David said that the one technology that is required and is not currently available for mobile AR is lenses. Current lenses have less than a 100 degrees field of view, suffer from chromatic aberration, are out of focus in the peripheral areas, and are much too heavy. Google Cardboard has a small field of view (70 degrees), while HTC Vive and Oculus with 95 degrees are not a lot better. From David's perspective this is the bottleneck that has held up mobile AR.

Now Wearality has developed acrylic lenses that are incredibly light-weight, have a 160 degree field of view when used with a smartphone, enable natural peripheral vision, and are foldable and pocketable. David allowed us to try them attached to a smart phone. The light weight, the wide field of vision and that I could use them with my glasses left me with the experience of IMAX, but without the theatre.

David foresees that even the next smartphone, or possibly the one after that, that you buy will be running AR out of the box. If you have wondered where Michael Jones, of Keyhole and Google Maps fame, has landed, he is now CEO of Wearality, which confirms for me that Wearality is very likely on to something and that all of us with smartphones have AR in our immediate future.

April 14, 2016

I have just experienced two remarkable days at the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, in itself a remarkable location near Houston. I will blog in more detail in the near future about the things and people I had the opportunity to experience over the past two days.

First of all, virtual reality. Everyone is aware of the Oculus Rift (see the new review at CNET if you aren't). There are other technologies that have come or are coming from Samsung, Sony and Google. But at SPAR 3D the most remarkable VR technology I personally experienced was what David Smith, CTO of Wearaility, talked about and allowed me and others to try - a set of incredibly light-weight glasses with acrylic lenses designed to work with a smartphone that gives you a virtual experience comparable to IMAX without the IMAX theatre. I tried it and found it an absolutely amazing surround experience. And if you have wondered where Michael Jones, of Keyhole and Google Maps fame, has landed, he is now CEO of Wearality.

Secondly, my personal passion is the geolocation of underground utilities. At SPAR 3D Mark Klusza, Founder & CTO, Real-time Metrology, Inc. described a major new advance in ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology he has developed that can detect a 3/4 inch rebar (among other things) four feet below the surface in clay.

For existing buildings creating a BIM model remains an art rather than science. But at SPAR 3D a number of new technologies were presented that can help automate, improve the quality, and speed the process. Foremost among them in my mind was presented by Nicolas Arnold, VP of Product Development, at SKUR. With SKUR's technology, which runs in the cloud, you can compare the 3D model that you have developed with the point cloud you derived the model from and identify all the points of significant variance. The same technology can also be used during a construction project to compare what has been built to what was designed - even when the building is only partially completed.

Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) described progress on his remarkable vision of how automation is upending how we design, build and monitor, operate and maintain U.S. highway systems. Richard Arrowsmith, Asset Information Group Team Leader, Highways England described the digital model of the English highway system. Stan Burns, President, Integrated Inventory, who has just retired from Utah DoT, described Utah DoT's comprehensive database of every piece of highway furniture and signage in the Utah highway system. Together these represent the future of the digitalization of national highway systems.

A new company, Indoor Reality, is the third startup of Dr Avideh Zakhor, who is on leave from the University of California Berkeley. Her new device is a backpack loaded with sensors including lasers and infrared that enables you to map the interior of buildings by simply walking through a multi-floor building, including up and down stairs. The resulting data can be used to automatically generate floor plans and 3D models and captures everything you need for an Energy Plus analysis.

Mark Shell and Darrell Gadberry, both of the City of Fort Worth Water Department, described a very versatile device with laser and sonar and camera devices on board that can be used for sewer line inspections of small and large diameter sewer pipes. Fundamentally this device enables condition-based maintenance of municipal sewer systems. Mark and Darrell reported that it has saved the Fort Worth Water Department $42 million.

I was able to interview Dr Avideh Zakhor, Nicolas Arnold, Ron Singh, Larry Kleinkemper of Lanmar Services who specialize in creating BIM models for existing buildings, and Greg Bentley of Bentley who has a broad, forward-looking perspective on the "digitalization" of infrastructure.

November 26, 2015

In general the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for commercial purposes is illegal in the U.S. although this is changing. In Canada regulation of UAVs is different. You can fly a UAV that weighs less than 25 kg for work or research without permission. However, there are severe restrictions. You must have at least $100,000 liability insurance, keep your UAV in direct line of sight, always fly during daylight and in good weather (no clouds, snow or icy conditions), avoid flying close to airports, in populated areas or near moving vehicles, and fly below 90 meters. The operator must be trained to understand airspace classification and structure, weather and notice to airmen (NOTAM) reporting services, aeronautical charts and relevant sections of the Canadian Aviation Regulations. To relax any of these restrictions, you will have to apply to Transport Canada for a Special Flight Operations Certificate which will require 20 working days to be issued. Transport Canada has issued thousands of these since 2000.

But this is changing. Today Ian Glenn, founder and CEO/CTO of ING Robotic Aviation, gave an extremely knowledgeable talk about commercial UAV operation in Canada current and future. He expects that within the next 12 months, legislation will be introduced that will significantly relax the current restrictive regulation of the commercial operation of UAVs without a Special Flight Operations Certificate.

The next step will be relaxing the line-of-sight restriction. Ian's perspective is that the key to commercial beyond-line-of-sight UAV operation will be equipping UAVs with automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast (ADS–B). An aircraft equipped ADS–B determines its position via satellite navigation and periodically broadcasts it, so that it can be tracked. The information can be received by air traffic control ground stations and by other aircraft, which provides situational awareness and allows self separation without ground control intervention. ADS–B is automatic - it requires no pilot or external input - so it can be included on a UAV. The cost of equipping an aircraft with ADS-B has come down and is currently on the order of $1000. This could mean that commercial operation of UAVs equipped with ADS-B will come to Canada sooner because Canada is already using ADS-B for Air Traffic Control. (It is part of the US Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen)). Ian suggested that we could see commercial beyond-line-of-sight operation of UAVs equipped with ADS-B within Canada in the next few years. That will dramatically open up the range of applications for commercial UAVs.

October 14, 2015

A major challenge for infrastructure companies is mapping infrastructure which is obscured by walls, soil or other materials. For example, detecting underground infrastructure is a remote-sensing challenge that is seeing rapid technological progress. Researchers at MIT have developed a prototype low cost, high resolution camera that can see through materials such as walls and plywood that visible and other types of camera can't see through. It can also image objects in 3D. This is very early in the development sequence, but the principle behind the camera is very general and promises to have applications in a number of areas including the infrastructure sector.

The prototype camera uses time of flight to create a 3D image of an object. It operates much the same way that radar and consumer devices such as the XBox Kinect work. The camera sends out bursts of microwaves and then tracks how long it takes for the microwaves to be reflected by something and return to the sensor. From the time of flight of the microwaves and the known speed of the microwave burst, it is possible to calculate the location of the bit of an object that reflected the microwave pulse. The prototype camera has a time resolution of 200 picoseconds (a picosecond is one trillionth of a second). This allows the camera to resolve distances with an accuracy of 6 cm, which is more than adequate for many infrastructure applications.

The camera is also capable of multispectral imaging. This means that it does not take a picture only at one wavelength, but at several. Every 10 milliseconds MIT camera's microwave emitter sweeps through the frequency range of 7.835 GHz to 12.817 GHz. Different material reflect the microwaves differently depending on frequency. The result is an image with different colours that makes it possible to distinguish between different materials.

To test the prototype camera MIT placed a mannequin covered in aluminum foil behind a drywall wall and a sheet of plywood. The aluminum is detectable at the wavelengths used at MIT. The mannequin was placed approximately 2.1 meters in front of the imaging system and the partition approximately 15–30 cm in front of the mannequin.

The camera is comprised of a microwave emitter and a reflector. The reflector is over a meter wide. Acquiring an image takes on the order of an hour. The approach is general enough that the MIT researchers believe that the camera could be made significantly smaller by using shorter wavelengths, millimeter waves instead of microwaves. However, for many infrastructure applications the size of the camera may not be a problem.

August 21, 2015

Earlier this week Github published a graph showing the relative popularity of programming languages among GitHub development project repositories, both private and public, for 2008 to 2015.

Some things don't seem too surprising. Javascript is at the top. C++ has stayed in the top 10 since 2008.

But a couple of things really surprised me. Of the three P's, PHP and Python have remained in the top 5 for the entire period, but Perl has fallen off the chart. CSS has risen dramatically. But the most surprising thing for me was the incredible rise of Java from 7th to 2nd since 2008. Not long ago it seemed that only the big system houses like HP, IBM and Oracle were using Java. One reason for its spectacular rise may be that it is suited to building big distributed internet systems (the Hadoop framework is implemented in Java). It is also used for Android which runs more than 50% of the world's smart phones. Something which may be related is the recent spurt in C# (Microsoft's version of Java). In the geospatial community the rise in Java popularity has been paralleled by the rise in the popularity of GeoServer and GeoTools both of which were developed using Java.

Finally, Apple's Swift development language for iOS, which Apple says it will open source, is off this graph, but apparently has already risen to 18th. It's rapid rise perhaps accounts partially for the drop in Objective-C, which has like C++ stayed in the top 10 - until very recently.

April 27, 2015

According to a recent article in Science, 132 CubeSats were launched in 2014. The original 1U CubeSat, designed in 1999, was a 10 cm cube weighing less than a kilogram. They could be launched on Russian rockets for about $30,000. NASA has a program called the CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) which provides opportunities for nanosatellites to fly inexpensively as auxiliary payloads on rockets supporting major missions. Currently they can be launched for about $100,000. The economics of these small satellites is so compelling that there is talk of a constellation of CubeSats replacing Landsat 8, which was launched in 2013 at a cost of $855 million. CubeSats are not restricted to low Earth orbit. It is planned to launch 6U CubeSats into orbits around Mars next year. The more generic terms for these satellites is nanosatellites for satellites weighing less than a kilogram and microsatellites for satellites up to 100 kg.

Planet Labs

The company was formed in 2010 under a different name. In April 2013 Planet Labs launched two demonstration satellites, “Dove 1” and “Dove 2”. Planet Labs has launched Flock 1 comprised of 28 CubeSats for Earth observation at an altitude of 400 km. The satellites are intended to provide frequent snapshots of the planet at a resolution of about 5 m, allowing users to track changes such as traffic jams, deforestation, construction progress in close to real time. The primary applications right now are agriculture - monitoring crop productivity, environmental compliance - monitoring restoration after mining, and commercial mapping - identifying new developments that require mapping.

Skybox/Google

Skybox Imaging, acquired by Google, has launched the SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 satellites (each larger than nanosatellites at about 100 kg) which capture sub-meter imagery and HD-video of any spot on earth, multiple times per day to provide timely high-resolution imagery, HD video, and analytics. First imagery can be seen here.

MarketsandMarkets has released a report entitled Nanosatellite and Microsatellite Market [Geographic Information system, Payload, Space Science, Satellite Communication, Satellite Imagery, Remote Sensing, Scientific Research, Reconnaissance, Satellite Launch] - Worldwide Market Forecast (2014 - 2019) in which it attempts to quantify the nano and microsatellite market. Nano and microsatellites includes satellites that weigh about 100 kg (such as the Skybox satellites) and less. According to MarketsandMarkets commercial as well as private ventures have started investing to capitalize on the opportunities presented through low-cost small satellite missions related to communication, earth-observation, remote-sensing, and many others. Integration of commercial-off-the-shelf electronic circuits is accelerating the demand for small satellites. MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the market for nanosatellites and microsatellites will grow at a rate (CAGR) of 21.8% per year from $700 million in 2014 to $1.9 billion in 2019.

March 11, 2015

INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015, a joint conference organized by the European Commission and Geospatial Media and Communications, has made available its full conference program. Almost 500 presentations are scheduled on topics including building information modelling (BIM), open data, big data analytics, open standards, linked data, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Earth observation, indoor positioning, land information systems for smart cities, urban resilience and sustainability, health, agriculture and others. Some 2000 delegates are expected to attend from more than 80 countries. Top sponsors include Trimble, Topcon, ESRI, Digital Globe, Oracle and Bentley.

The theme of the conference is CONVERGENCE: Policies + Practices + Processes via PPP with a focus on improving coordination among policy-makers, technology providers and users. Including geospatial data and technology in construction, agriculture, health and other industry workflows is an enabler for more successful public–private partnerships (PPP) by facilitating more informed decision making among the stakeholders.